Presentation Type
Poster
Faculty Advisor
Lauren Covey
Access Type
Open Access
Start Date
26-4-2024 11:15 AM
End Date
26-4-2024 12:15 PM
Description
Metaphors are linguistically interesting because they involve going beyond literal interpretation. For example, “night owl” can refer to an animal or a person who is active at night. Psycholinguistic researchers investigating metaphor comprehension must develop sets of stimuli (linguistic items used in experiments) that include metaphors and literal items as a baseline. One approach is to use metaphorical word pairs, because it lets researchers control several important variables, including how frequent words are within the language. For the first time, we have created a set of word pair stimuli in Spanish, which is particularly challenging because most metaphors consist of three or more words (e.g., “ponte las pilas” ‘put on the batteries’). During a nine month period, I compiled a list of over 40 existing metaphors in Spanish and structured them into word pairs. In order to create a comprehensive stimuli set, I generated 40 novel metaphor word pairs, and 80 literal word pairs (including both familiar and novel items). Utilizing a corpus (collection of texts that includes billions of words) I extracted frequency data in Spanish. The control of both frequency of each word and its letter count is important. Our next steps involve conducting a two-way ANOVA to compare these variables across conditions with the goal of using these new stimuli sets for a psycholinguistic experiment with Spanish-English bilinguals. Results demonstrate successful control over individual word and word pair frequency across conditions, suggesting the possibility of creating frequency-normed word pair stimuli sets in Spanish for future experiments
Included in
Developing 240 Spanish Word Pair Stimuli for a Psycholinguistic Experiment
Metaphors are linguistically interesting because they involve going beyond literal interpretation. For example, “night owl” can refer to an animal or a person who is active at night. Psycholinguistic researchers investigating metaphor comprehension must develop sets of stimuli (linguistic items used in experiments) that include metaphors and literal items as a baseline. One approach is to use metaphorical word pairs, because it lets researchers control several important variables, including how frequent words are within the language. For the first time, we have created a set of word pair stimuli in Spanish, which is particularly challenging because most metaphors consist of three or more words (e.g., “ponte las pilas” ‘put on the batteries’). During a nine month period, I compiled a list of over 40 existing metaphors in Spanish and structured them into word pairs. In order to create a comprehensive stimuli set, I generated 40 novel metaphor word pairs, and 80 literal word pairs (including both familiar and novel items). Utilizing a corpus (collection of texts that includes billions of words) I extracted frequency data in Spanish. The control of both frequency of each word and its letter count is important. Our next steps involve conducting a two-way ANOVA to compare these variables across conditions with the goal of using these new stimuli sets for a psycholinguistic experiment with Spanish-English bilinguals. Results demonstrate successful control over individual word and word pair frequency across conditions, suggesting the possibility of creating frequency-normed word pair stimuli sets in Spanish for future experiments